Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Richard Stallman]

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    I believe the commands that use shell-command-to-string are a good
    example of these cases.  That function is frequently used as
    infrastructure to query an external program about something, and the
    result is then used, at least in some cases, to decide how to proceed.

1. The scenario we've been told about is where the invalid UTF-8 gets
passed on to some other program.  I don't think any harm will come if
Emacs itself looks at the output of the command.  Emacs does not
generally get confused by raw bytes.

2. It would not be hard to make another function (which does strict
decoding) to recommend instead of shell-command-to-string for use in
Lisp code in certain cases.

3. It would be easy enough to make shell-command-to-string do flexible
decoding when called interactively and do strict decoding when called
noninteractively -- controlled through an optional argument.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
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